


Ding-a-Ling

by alternatealto



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-24
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-01-20 14:30:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1513907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alternatealto/pseuds/alternatealto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>House doesn't even have to be nearby to cause chaos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ding-a-Ling

**Ding-a-ling**  
  
  
He’d fallen in love with it the moment he’d seen it in the catalog. 

Why, he had no idea.  It was just one of those things – something you didn’t truly _need,_  just really, really wanted, and for no good reason.  He’d looked at the picture, read the description, decided it wouldn’t be practical and turned the page.  Five minutes later, he was staring at the picture again.  It was just so . . .  so _retro_.  So solid-looking.  And almost certainly better than anything he could buy in a store. Totally refurbished, too, so it really would work with the modern stuff.  No buttons, of course, but that was part of the appeal, the whole sense of harking back to a more leisurely era. 

He closed the catalog and set it aside.  He didn’t need a $235.00 telephone, no matter how cool it would look on an occasional table in the living room. 

The thing had a  _cord,_ for god’s sake. 

A  _short_  cord. 

Completely impractical.   

Wilson glared at the catalog, sitting innocently on the coffee table. He  _did not need_ that telephone. 

 

   
When he picked it up at his building’s mail room ten days later, he was surprised first by the size of the box, and then by the weight.  But he  _had_  ordered the phone with the cast zinc body instead of the lighter thermoplastic version, so it wasn’t unreasonable for it to weigh a good bit.  It was just as well, really – Sarah had shown a tendency to play with anything he left on a table in the living room, and her version of playing was to nudge things off the edge of the table with her paw, then look inquiringly over the edge to see if the object had bounced.  Unsurprisingly, few bits of bric-a-brac hold up well under this sort of treatment -- and since Wilson was tired of coming home and sweeping up every day, he’d begun to just leave things on his tables that  _did_  bounce.   Or that at least didn’t shatter.   

Here he was, forty-something years old, and making his home decoration decisions based on the whims of an animal he’d taken in out of pity.  House would probably make some kind of crack about that when he noticed, as he inevitably would. 

He manoeuvered his way carefully across the foyer and into the living room, doing his best not to step on the cat wrapping herself joyously around his legs.  Arriving in the kitchen, he set the box down on the island, hunted up a utility knife to open it with, dug through layers of packing peanuts, and finally produced the thing, carefully swathed in further layers of bubble wrap and packing tape.  It was a good fifteen minutes before he finally had it out and assembled:  a Western Electric 302 Desk Phone, in gleaming black metal and bakelite.   He stood and admired it for a few minutes, lifting the handset to feel the solid weight of it, running a caressing finger along the sleek curves of the body.  At last he lifted it and took it over to the end table closest to a wall jack; Sarah following close behind and hopping up onto a chair to supervise as he plugged it in and checked for a dial tone.   

“It works!  There, Sarah – let’s see if you can push  _that_  off the table.”  His cordless phone’s handset had been one of the first victims of Sarah’s “bounce test”, and now she was stretched between the chair and the table, lengthening her neck to sniff cautiously at the shiny new black thing.  Having determined that it wouldn’t bite, she decided to go back to the chair and ignore the phone in favor of demanding dinner with a loud, peremptory meow. 

“Okay, okay,” he said, ruffling the soft fur gently.  “But you get your shot first.” 

He reached down and picked her up just as the phone rang.   

A Western Electric 302 Desk Phone does not chirp.  It does not beep, or whirr, or trill.  It  **rings ,** with the full authority of a metal bell intended to cut through the ambient noise of a busy mid-twentieth-century office, overpower the rattle of typewriters and the drone of conversation, and  _attract attention_.  In this case, it succeeded beyond its manufacturer’s wildest hopes. 

One moment, Wilson was holding a placid ball of white fur.  The next, he had his hands around a yowling, hissing, spitting demon with viciously sharp teeth and knives on all four feet.  He later found gashes in places he didn’t remember being clawed at the time. 

Stupidly, his first response was to try to calm the terrified animal, and he might have succeeded if the unanswered telephone hadn’t kept on ringing, stimulating Sarah to further heights of frenzy.  Finally his sense of self-preservation kicked in and he let go.  A white-and-red streak shot across the living room and into the den, leaving Wilson to contemplate the ruins of his light blue dress shirt and grey slacks, both of which were quickly becoming saturated with scarlet.   

Then the pain hit, and he swore as he bent over and picked up the handset, forgetting for a moment that it wasn’t cordless, and that the cord was, in fact, short. The handset was jerked out of his grasp as the heavy metal body of the phone toppled off the table.  It would have left quite a dent in the hardwood floor, if only Wilson’s foot hadn’t been in the way.   

He wanted to scream, but the sudden wave of agony left him unable to make any sound at all.  So he could clearly hear the person on the other end of the line.    
  
"Did I call at a bad time?" House asked.

 


End file.
